Jinhee Lee; Looking Outwards 02

Above this text is a video project titled “Sun,” made and published by Robert Hodgin in 2015. Among several other animation projects he’s done, this video was made using Cinder, which is a “C++ library for programming with aesthetic intent – the sort of development often called creative coding,” encompassing various domains like “graphics, audio, video, and computational geometry,” as described on its homepage.

This coding service is peer-reviewed and apparently free, which compounds with my surprise that sophisticated coding purely for the sake of artistic visuals, rather than the application of such, existed. From the looks of Hodgin’s other projects, Cinder is vastly diverse in its aesthetic capabilities, ranging from displaying – in Hodgin’s case – a school of fish, taxi routes in a city, spectacles in space, and particles flowing in space as if carried by an air current.

Hodgin’s “Sun” project caught my eye in particular, for its theme and because, with my current knowledge of coding, its animation is the one I find simplest to understand. Two celestial bodies, one (presumably the Earth) orbiting its gargantuan counterpart spinning in place, and that’s all.

Aesthetically speaking, I appreciate all the small details added to the Sun to make it feel organic rather than procedurally generated, as well as the fact that, being the largest thing on the screen, it takes up the vast majority of the viewer’s attention. Additionally, the comparatively tiny and featureless Earth revolving around the Sun add to the overwhelming presence of the latter body. An effect the author achieved with naught but a tiny moving black circle.

Below is a link to additional projects that Robert Hodgin has done:

https://vimeo.com/flight404/videos